The Magnificent Mandarin - Ruritania's engagement with China

Ruritania's engagement with "The Orient" stretches back to before the "Marauding Mongols" who may have become Magyars in Hungary as early as the eleventh century. The Slavs preceded them with their consonant clusters in earlier "migrations". Marco Polo's travels were transcribed with varying degrees of accuracy into the Ruritanian vernacular languages in the later middle ages and in the nineteenth century, the Oriental Institute was established in Prague.

Many of the region's twentieth century avant garde had more than a passing acquaintance with notions of the Orient. Egon Bondy studied Chinese philosophy from Tao to Mao and wrote extensively on the topic. However, it was his poem "Podivuhodný mandarin" which associated notion of the orient more closely with "underground" or avant garde thinking in the 1950s and then again in the 1970s and 1980s when The Plastic People of The Universe set the poem to music. "Podivuhodný mandarin" is usually translated as "Wonderous Madarin" in English, though the adjective "podivuhodný" can be rendered as "miraculous", "magnificent" or even "admirable".

Bondy's "Podivuhodný mandarin" bears a striking resemblance to the Melchoir Lengyel's earlier novella "Csodálatos mandarin [Marvellous Mandarin]" (1916) which, in turn, was turned into a "one act pantomime ballet" composed by Béla Bartók which premiered in November 1926 in Cologne, Germany. There, it caused a scandal and was subsequently banned on moral grounds.

Béla Bartók's new music fared much better at its launch in Prague however, but the mandarin character remains uncomfortable and his representation says more about those engaging with him than the mandarin himself.

Lengyel's mandarin is a wealthy and exotically-dressed user of prostitutes who ends up murdered by the gang of beggar-pimps. It is an uncomfortable representation describing exploitation in many voices. Bondy's poem is shorter and his mandarin more ambiguous; representing lust and greed, the poem describes the destruction of those seeking to profit from the mandarin. It ends with

...impotent and done in                               
you’ll realize that life is god’s millstone                                                
and not the gorgeous, wondrous mandarin.

Quotes from Bondy's poem and its precursor, Melchoir Lengyel's earlier novella "Csodálatos mandarin", were strangely absent from public forums on the western border of Ruritania two weeks ago when President Xi of China visited Prague.

Those more interested in the Ruritanian Gothic end of world culture than post-colonial criticism could do worse than engaging for a few minutes with those Plastic People from Bohemia and Moravia who turned Bondy's poem into a song in the early 1970s translated by a certain blogger into the English rhyming couplets show below:

Wondrous Mandarin                                                                        
 
Just spread your legs out, open wide                                                     
and swallow that wondrous mandarin inside

Dress yourself in vanity-guilt satin                                          
to feel close to the wondrous mandarin

With your head, dark eyes and blood pounding,                
craving the gorgeous, wondrous mandarin

Many times you’ll just want to give in                                    
because he wasn’t the wondrous mandarin
           
Then at forty, impotent and done in                               
you’ll realize that life is god’s millstone                                                
and not the gorgeous, wondrous mandarin

Imre Kertesz - RIP

The 2002 Nobel Literature Prize winner died this morning aged 86 at his home in Budapest. He had been ill for some time. One of Europe's best stylists in the novella form, his work drew on his own experiences as a teenage Holocaust survivor and beyond.

Written between 1960 and 1973, his first novella "Fateless" was rejected for publication at first by Communist censors and was finally released in 1975, but was largely ignored in Hungary despite the  500,000 Hungarian Jews being killed by the Nazis.

It would be fair to say that Kertesz had a tempestuous relationship with the Hungarian state both before and after the regime changes in 1989. He was a noted critic of the current administration. However, his talent was not limited to painful descriptions of murder. His novella "Union Jack" set during the Hungarian Uprising in 1956 and featuring the flag of the Her Majesty's Ambassador's car right at the end of the narrative is one of the finest and funniest satires to emerge from central Europe. Your correspondent will read some of that novella this evening.

Ruritainian Gothic tales on sale in SE London bookshop

Halcyon Books, 266 Lee High Road, London SE

Samko Tále's Cemetery Book Review

Samko Tále’s Cemetery Book by Daniela Kapitáňová, translated by Julia Sherwood. 
Garnett Press, 2011, 130 pages.

On the border of Ruritania and not far from France and very definitely north of the Mediterranean lies the land of present day Slovakia. It is a land with borders of its own: linguistic, geographical, rational and not very rational. All is explained by the Everyman
Samko Tále, with his first attempt at a hit list of those he wishes to see under gravestones in his local cemetery. The list isn't very long, so Samko Tále begins his second attempt at his Cemetery Book because his handcart is being repaired and it is raining. Also, we learn that a drunken mystic named Gusto Rúhe has advised Samko that he is destined to write. Thus, to fill in time, Samko decides to become a writer. Samko describes small-town life in modern Slovakia which is merely another province within Ruritania. His philosophy develops through a series of anecdotes that introduce the reader to his family and other misfits left behind by history in the Slovak border town of Komárno. The cemetery metaphor is explored with gusto in 130 pages of fun as Samko’s mask is revealed ever funnier and more terrifying.

We read of Samko’s proud achievement in the Young Pioneers and his respect for Gunár, the town’s former top communist official, but as he continues, Samko seems to pay more attention to the opaque predictions of the town’s drunk and mystic, Gusto Rúhe. Further comedy occurs with the shifting politics of Samko’s parents as history’s inevitability collapses into another universe. His uncle’s mission to heal the world with mushrooms provides one of the book’s finest themes, though unfortunately, we never find out if or how this was achieved. Such ambiguity, though, is not present when Samko lists his complaints against Czechs, Gypsies, Hungarians and his shock at inter-racial marriage.

Samko’s sour voice allows scant ‘wiggle room’ for any translator. However, Julia Sherwood’s translation provides a master class in how to render tone; for instance Alf Névéry’s cause of death is first introduced as “of failure” and then later, with the introduction of the indefinite article, “of a failure”. Quite what failed inside Alf is left for the reader to infer, but the episode remains hugely funny.

Many reviews describe Samko as some kind of post-1989 Forrest Gump and in doing so, miss the point. Samko is not a Slovak Forrest Gump but a subverted Pinocchio. Instead of wanting to be a boy, Samko is revealed as a gimp, a fascinating and thought-provoking insight into ourselves. He is local and universal, Slovak and Ruritanian, a complex collection of hopes, conceit and petty feuds.

Where is Ruritania?

 

One might begin with answering another question, "What is Ruritania?". If one refers to the font of all knowledge online one receives the oversimplified and frankly unusable answer, "Ruritania is a fictional country in central Europe which forms the setting for three books by Anthony Hope: The Prisoner of Zenda (1894), The Heart of Princess Osra (1896), and Rupert of Hentzau (1898)".

Scrolling down the font of all knowledge online, one learns that those novels written by Anthony Hope spawned a literary genre known as Ruritanian Romance.

However, my favourite fact from the font of all knowledge online is that Ruritania features in a treaty between Indonesia and Australia which among other things, seeks to protect both from a potential but unknown enemy which, for the sake of the treaty, shall be named Ruritania. One cannot make up things like that. It is so absurd, entertaining and anti-rational that it actually doesn't matter whether such a treaty exists and why should be we believe that font of all knowledge anyway - just because it is free? Tish and Pish.

The questions "What is Ruritania?" and "Where is Ruritania?" have no simple answers. However, if one reads this blog on a regular basis, one may get to learn of its rich literary culture, its books and where to buy them. For even in Ruritania, one must earn a living, even if it is by minstrelsy.

Today's partial answer is: "Ruritania is a fictional land to the east of France and to the north of the Mediterranean and may contain provinces known by other names like Slovakia or Slovenia" though, it may be rather hard to think of them as different and also, why would want to know the detail? The Australians have already found a contradictory answer.

Happy Reading